Tag: Paul Thomas Anderson

Licorice Pizza

Posted on by victorfraga

Paul Thomas Anderson’s hotly anticipated new movie is a simple boy-meets-girl tale, in the San Fernando Valley during the year of 1973. Anderson is a native and current resident of the Valley and has often set his films there including Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), and Punch-Drunk Love (2002).

Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana (Alana Haim) are the odd-couple leads. Hoffman is the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of Anderson’s most frequent collaborators; Haim is from the pop band Haim, for whom Anderson has done several music videos. Gary is loosely based on Gary Goetzman, a child actor in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, who later became a long-time collaborator of Jonathan Demme, and is now Tom Hanks’s production partner. Goetzman himself told Anderson some of the outrageous stories, on which the movie is inspired. The story revolves around following the couple’s adventures across the Valley, the strange people they meet, and their relationship, which may or may not become romantic.

Gary is a 15-year-old child actor at the cusp of aging out of such roles, as well as an unlikely hustler. Much of the humour in the film derives from Gary’s bizarre start-ups, including a waterbed and a pinball company. Very unusual endeavours, particularly for such a young entrepreneur. Gary meets Alana during school photo day, where she’s is working as a photographer’s assistant. He asks her out for dinner, and they quickly develop a friendship. She ends up as his chaperone in New York City for an appearance on a variety show featuring Lucy Doolittle (in an apparent reference to American comedian Lucille Ball). They come in and out of each other lives with the same question looming over the their heads: will they become romantically involved? The central performances are very natural; Hoffman and Haim have a bright future ahead should they decide to pursue an acting career.

Cinematographer Michael Bauman shot the movie on textured 35mm widescreen. It looks like the film could have been made in the 1970s, some lost classic of freewheeling American cinema. It has a shade of Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971), with two misfits finding each other and bonding. It’s also very Altman-esque, with a large cast of characters who wander in and out of the action. This group includes Bradley Cooper’s unhinged portrayal of the notorious hairdresser-turned-movie producer Jon Peters, who likes to proclaim he’s “from the streets,” and Sean Penn playing a character called Jack Holden (a nod to actor William Holden:). Tom Waits appears as Rex Blau, a mix of Sam Fuller and Sam Peckinpah, and Bennie Safdie as real-life local politician Joel Wachs. Alana’s real-life family plays her family.

The backdrop includes the oil crisis of 1973. Gary and Lana have to drive a van down the hills of the Valley with no petrol, with Jon Peters lurking around, very much à la Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977). Interestingly, Licorice Pizza never features the record chain of the film the title, however incorporating the jaunty and carefree vibe of the decade when the now-defunct company thrived. The soundtrack is composed of big hits from the time, including the best usage of a the Doors song since the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979).

Licorice Pizza is a lovely movie: deeply romantic and rip-roaringly funny, while also paying tribute to a bygone era. On all major VoD platforms on Friday, April 1st.

Anima

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A twelve or so minute collaboration between director Paul Thomas Anderson and musician Thom Yorke of Radiohead, this is being screened in Digital IMAX at various locations round the world this Wednesday. To some extent it has a built in audience. Admirers of the director, who has dabbled in 70mm movies (The Master, 2012) and worked with Radiohead on three 2016 promos will want to see it. More significant for the money men ( and women) is Radiohead’s and Thom Yorke’s audience. The band and he pretty much have creative control over everything they do, never worry about so-called commercial concerns and (when they don’t give their work away) sell albums by the truckload.

Anima, described as a one-reeler, is set to three new Yorke songs and features Yorke and a plethora of dancers. He wakes up on a tube train where other sleeping upright in their seats passengers clad in manual labourers’ clothing move in their sleep. Heads collapse onto waiting hands or jerk on necks. At some point you realise you’re watching a dance routine and your perception of the whole thing changes. And at some point, he is eyeing up a girl (Dajana Roncione) who is likewise eyeing him up among the other passengers.

At a station, the doors open and everyone disembarks. Thom Yorke picks up a metal lunch box that someone has left and goes after them with it – we’re not sure if he actually saw who left it, but anyway he goes with the flow. After a lot of walking, with his fellow passengers snapping awake as they leave the carriage, the exit barriers refuse to let him through. No-one else has this problem and before he’s resolved it with a run at the barriers and a dive over, a lady passenger has taken the lunch box.

There follows an episode in which Thom Yorke has to cross an area where a group of dancers are themselves moving as one across the area in a way that prevents anyone else doing so in a contrary direction. Sitting in this area is the lunch box, which Yorke wants to retrieve. Although the ground is flat, at some point it must have switched to a 45 degree incline because that’s how Yorke and everyone else stands on it, at a 45 degree incline.

After this he finds himself leaning on the wall. The girl is there. Together they roll along the wall, a dance of life. They and other couples run joyously, together then board a bus.

The whole plays as a one man against the system narrative. Along with boy meets girl and, presumably, they all live happily ever after. Although the monotony of the workers ‘ existence might suggest otherwise. Visually, the whole thing is spectacular, a full-blown dystopian dance movie like an update of the shuffling workers in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927). Radiohead and Thom Yorke fans will like it as an extension of the band’s Gen X persona, and it’s worth seeing as an interesting addition to Paul Thomas Anderson’s impressive, wider body of work

Anima is in select IMAX cinemas from Wednesday, June 26th and on Netflix from Thursday, June 27th. Watch the trailer below:

Phantom Thread

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

American director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film to be set in England ostensibly concerns a ladies’ dress designer to the rich and famous in the 1950s. It moves between London where Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) works and the house in the country where he relaxes. It also moves between the obsessive, creative designer and his efficient, business-minded sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) and Alma (Vicky Krieps), the woman he meets and comes slowly but surely to depend on as his model, muse and partner. Beneath the surface, it’s about relationships, manipulation and control.

There’s also the two siblings’ long dead mother with whom Reynolds – basically a mother’s boy – is obsessed. So much so that, when he falls ill (possibly fatally), he sees her standing by the wall of his bedroom and speaks to her (she doesn’t respond). We know it’s her because of a photograph seen earlier: the apparition gives away no more information than the photograph. “Always carry it with you”, he tells Alma on their first date. He likes sewing things – photographs coins, messages – into clothing. His mother’s picture is sewn into his coat lining.

When I say first date… Well, Reynolds wines and dines Alma, a very ordinary waitress with a slight German accent who’s working at a small village hotel, then takes her back to his house in the country… so that he can try out material on her torso and start designing a dress for her. Later, he gets out his tape measure just in time for Cyril to turn up and write down Alma’s measurements as Reynolds calls them out.

The narrative parades a bewildering array of House of Woodcock clientele, from fans who would give anything to wear one of his dresses (swiftly dismissed from the Woodcock restaurant table by Cyril) to royalty with entourage, from a well-paying but ultimately self-loathing drunk to Alma the muse. Reynolds and Alma remove a commissioned dress from the drunk’s body as she sleeps her stupor off. “Not worthy of the House of Woodcock”, says Alma.

Also on show is the dress design, manufacture and modelling display process, complete with a team of seamstresses who, when Reynolds falls ill and collapses onto a dress, have to work late in order to repair it for delivery abroad the next morning.

By far the most interesting aspect of the film, however, is the interplay between the three main characters. Reynolds can be stubborn, telling Alma she’s making too much noise buttering her toast at breakfast which destroys the rest of his working day. Alma obsessively loves Reynolds and desires to have him and his time on her own terms. As such, she is more than his match. As too is Cyril. A power struggle between the two women is inevitable. Even more interesting, picking mushrooms in the country, Alma decides that the only way to get Reynolds under her control may be to poison him, something with which Reynolds, once he realises what she’s up to, readily complies.

So although this has all the trappings of a film about fashion and clothes design (specifically dresses) and more than satisfies on that level, and while it’s also beautifully paced and photographed and boasts a fantastic period score by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, the film plays out less as a 1950s period costume piece and more as a drama about some very dark interpersonal subject matter indeed. It feels less epic than certain of Anderson’s earlier offerings (Boogie Nights/1997, Magnolia/1999, The Master/2012) and closer to his more intimate debut Hard Eight a.k.a. Sydney (1996) and his other Day-Lewis collaboration There Will Be Blood (2012). Hard Eight shows a lowlife US world and Blood a self-made man. However, Thread’s characters are most definitely English (or German immigrant in Alma’s case) and part of the circus surrounding and servicing the privileged classes.

We’d love to see Anderson dealing with something that gets under the skin of ordinary, non-privileged Brits rather than the well-heeled types so often portrayed in US and indeed British dramas. For now, though, the slow-burning Phantom Thread will do very nicely, thank you.

Phantom Thread is out in the UK on Friday, February 2nd. The film has received six Oscar nominations. On Netflix in January 2020.